Southern California home prices fall in August

LOS ANGELES 
Southern California home prices declined in August from their year-ago levels for a sixth consecutive month as sales of low-priced properties continued to dominate the market, a tracking firm said Wednesday.

San Diego-based DataQuick said the median home price of $279,000 for the six-county region fell 3.1 percent from $288,000 in August 2010 and dropped 1.4 percent from $283,000 in July.

DataQuick said 19,654 homes sold last month, an increase of 6 percent from 18,541 in August 2010 and 8.6 percent from 18,090 in July.

The firm noted that the increases are at least partly due to the relatively high number of business days last month. The number of homes sold per day in August fell 6 percent from the month-ago average and rose less than 1 percent from a year ago.

"Scratch beneath the surface and there's not a lot to cheer about this month," DataQuick President John Walsh said in a news release. "Many would-be buyers can't find financing, and others who want to make a move now are stuck because they owe more than their homes are worth."

Although home sales are sluggish overall, sales of homes in the under-$300,000 segment rose 10.2 percent in August from a year earlier, the firm noted.

"Anything like that moves pretty quickly, compared to something that is, say, $500,000, which may sit on the market for a while," said Daniel Venturoli, a real estate agent in north Los Angeles County.

He said there's also less supply of high-end homes, since their more-affluent owners can afford to hold onto the properties while they wait for them to regain some value lost in the downturn.

"A lot of people are just not putting their property on the market at the upper-end level because they know they're going to lose and they're not in trouble," Venturoli said.

DataQuick said more than half of last month's sales came from troubled owners who were financially compelled to relinquish their properties.

Foreclosures accounted for 34.6 percent of August's sales, up slightly from 34.5 percent in July but down from 37.6 percent a year earlier.

Short-sale transactions, in which lenders allow homes to be sold for less than what is owed on them, accounted for 17.9 percent of existing home sales. That was up from 17.3 percent in July but down from 18.9 percent a year earlier.

Walsh said fears of continued troubles in the broader economy were keeping the housing market from recovering more rapidly.

"Financial markets are increasingly choppy, the political outlook is incredibly murky, and consumer confidence remains poor," he said. "It's not an environment ripe for stabilizing the housing market."